


falling from the love we never earned

by jane_wanderlust



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-25
Updated: 2012-01-25
Packaged: 2017-10-30 02:19:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,816
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/326687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jane_wanderlust/pseuds/jane_wanderlust
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stefan and Katherine, nightmares repeating.</p>
            </blockquote>





	falling from the love we never earned

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from the song "And the Boys," by Angus & Julia Stone.

\--------------------------------

  
Stefan stepped off the train, brought a knuckle to his mouth, blew useless breath on his skin. He wasn’t cold, but he felt it. He should have felt it. There was snow curling a tunnel in thick sheets around his shoulders. People were walking past him quickly in soft, uncertain steps; the press and release of their shoes indenting stories in the snow.  
   
He was barefoot.  
   
He curled his toes into the white, crushed it into a fine, slick powder. It hurt; he felt like it must hurt. But then, everything did. This life was peeling him in shards, blood thick in his mouth. He felt used and new all at once, drew in a breath and walked forward.  
   
No one looked twice; and he thought  _Humans are so beautiful. Tucked into their worlds; passing and moving, and not ever stopping. Not ever. No one breathes, but everyone has lungs. Wasteful. So wasteful._  
   
He threw his arm out, wrapped bone-bred fingers around a woman’s wrist. She turned her blank, black eyes on him, acquiescing to his will. She bent her head; chin a sharp white point in a sharp black night. His gums throbbed, the tissue withdrawing over bone. He opened his mouth, smiled around fangs.  
   
Her skin was ash in his mouth.  
   
She was speaking to him, asking his name. Then telling him his name, over and over, reminding him of things too old to be forgotten.  
   
“Stefan? Stefan.  _Stefan,_ ” a chant to pull his weakness from his skin. He pulled back, his hands aching to wrap themselves around her neck; to twist and watch the world end on her ruined face.  
   
But her eyes lightened into a brown the color of new earth. Her hair spilled in curls over his hands, threading through his fingers, thick and harsh. “Stefan?” she asked again. Her eyes fell open fully, wider and wider; he could see his life expanding and breathing in her pupils. He smiled.  
   
“Katherine,” he said, the name feeling salted and fresh on his tongue. He brought the pads of his fingers to the lift of her cheekbone, traced memories on her skin. Her eyelashes dipped low, she brought a hand to his wrist; it was gloved in silk, a call of a time long, long before.  
   
“We’re going to be late,” she told him, turning her face into his palm.  
   
He wanted to drop to his knees, kiss the arch of her foot. He wanted to hide his fear in the dip of her ribcage; to press his hatred, his love, to the arch of her brow. He pulled on her hair instead, unwarranted. His fingers dipped into the strands, tugged to let her know:  _I am here, and you are. We are here, now, in this moment._  
   
She pulled his hand, urging him. “Stefan, please,” she said, a note of hysteria creeping in on her tone. “We’re going to miss it.”  
   
He let her pull him, disbelieving and cold – he should be; he  _is_  – deeper into the night.  
   
“Late for what?” he asked her, staring at their interlocked fingers, skin and satin, satin and skin.  
   
The curve of her cheek over her shoulder directed his attention to her face. She was smiling. He wanted to taste it.  
   
“The world.” She said and laughed.  
   
He was wearing shoes, now: thickly-soled and leather. The laces were eating at the flesh, pulling taught.  
   
He breathed out, and the world ignited. Flames lapped at his skin, he turned his face to the heat. Katherine pressed her mouth to his throat, and he watched through slit eyes as her hair caught fire.  
   
He laughed, pressed his nose to her temple.  
   
 _This is love and this is how it burns_ , he thought. He wanted to set his lips to her breast. He felt his knees bending to his will, and her hands curled at his ears.  
   
“Stefan,” his eyes opened full and heavy, he felt ashamed and unknowing: why, where he was, when it was; who he was.  _But no, not that._  She was reminding him, but she wasn’t supposed to be here: alive, with him,  _alive._  
   
He sat up and eyed her warily through concern-tinted vision. She was sitting there, and her hair was not aflame, and her hands were bare. She was there and whole and she shouldn’t be.  _She shouldn’t be._  
   
He brought two hands to her face, brushed through the air and dropped them to her shoulders, forcing her from his bed. She fell with the force, though he thought emptily in the back of his mind, that she could’ve fought the momentum easily.  
   
“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked her, his voice a thick and vigilant shadow.  
   
“It’s good to see you, too,” she told him, dusting nothingness off of her knees as she stood. “I see you’re still dreaming of me,” she added, a smirk in the cock of her hip.  
   
He felt raw and naked before her, the twisted and broken plain of his mind a canvas for her paints. He felt he could hate her – _should_  hate her – but his eyes still dropped to the lift of her breasts through the thin material of her shirt. He knew she traced his path. He didn’t care; why should he hide? He never could before.  
   
“ _Why_ are you  _here?_ ” he asked her again, hands clenching at his sides.  
   
“I was looking for you. I’ve  _been_  looking for you,” she said, flipping a hank of hair behind her shoulder. “You’re not as easy to find as you used to be,” she informed him, and, without knowing why, he felt ashamed.  
   
“I didn’t want to be found,” he told her pointedly, but it felt sour in his mouth.  
   
“Well, who is even left to look?” she asked - said, and he would wince if it wasn’t all so very Katherine. Straight and mean and to-the-point-cold; his useless heart beat heavily in his chest.  
   
Stefan sighed, defeated, dropped to his bed; dropped his face into his hands.  
   
“Leave,” he told her through his fingers. He felt the bed dip beside him. It was all so very Katherine.  
   
“Don’t brood too hard, Stefan, we wouldn’t want to show your age,” she said, but her voice belied a thread of concern, a beat of relief.  
   
He waited for the light to expel itself from his vision; he waited for the world to regenerate. Everything felt sick and hollow in his body; oh, how he wanted and waited and ached for everything he had lost.  
   
“How did you find me?” he asked her instead of any of the other treacherous thoughts that were pounding rhythms on his brain.  
   
“Oh, you know,” she said, and paused for effect; continued with a lilt in her voice. “Breadcrumbs.”

Katherine breathed out deeply through her teeth. But it was false; this life was no fairytale; and at the end was only the world, consuming and consuming. Lives became dusted bones that smeared in his throat.  
   
Stefan said nothing; let the silence be his reply. Words were only worth so much to Katherine. Katherine, who could bewitch them to her liking; twist them to fit her purpose, her mood. He dropped his hands to his knees, pulled on the flesh.  
   
Everything between them stretched out like an ocean, wide and swallowing; it hurt.  
   
Katherine’s voice broke the current, and it was soft; so achingly, tortuously soft: the tone foreign to her teeth. “I thought you could use a friend.”  
   
 _Liar_ , he thought. “Liar,” he said. There was no air for his lungs that needed none.  
   
She laughed out a sound of the wasteland. “I thought I could use one.” She said, and dropped her hand next to his knee. There was a scar there, in the dip beneath her small finger: an accident from when she was a girl, broken glass and flowers at her mother’s feet. Katherine had told him this when he asked her once, naked and human and dragging his tongue along the raised flesh. She had answered and looked saddened for something long since gone, wrapped her fingers around his raised flesh.  
   
Stefan shook his head of its memories.  
   
“I’m not your friend, Katherine,” he told her, biting out the truth from the mold of a lie. “I never was,” he continued, and watched a spasm in the back of her hand.  
   
She stood, and he couldn’t stop his neck from raising and following her.  
   
She stepped into the cradle of his knees, pushed her hands against his shoulders, dropped her mouth to his and bit past his barriers; sucked out of him his fight. He curled his tongue – heavy and traitorous – against the back of her teeth. The point of a fang nicked; there was blood in his mouth.  
   
She swallowed like an ocean; pressed him back to the bed.  
   
“Elena is dead. Damon is dead,” she told him, scraping her teeth down the hinge of his jaw, the column of his throat. Everything in him seized and tore, he bit his nails into her flesh; she arched her back.  
   
“Caroline,” she punctuated the name with a lick, “dead.” A bite here. “Bonnie,” a soothing swipe of her tongue, “dead.” The rip of her teeth. “Jeremy, Tyler, Matt, with his very blue eyes,” she breathed in a sharp tug of air as he curled long fingers around her breast, “d _ead._ ” She dropped her mouth to his chest.  
   
He pulled his hand from her chest, wrapped his hands around her hips and pressed her down angrily.  
   
“I’m  _here_ , Stefan,” she said, and the tone of it – the meaning of it – hurt worse than the sink of her fangs under his collarbone. So gentle, so full of pity.  
   
He would take from her that softness; she deserved none. He would fuck her till she hated him – because soft words, soft things didn’t belong to her. They  _fucked_ , they did nothing more; she  _was_ nothing more. He convinced himself; _always._  
   
He felt her lies in the heat of her; he felt his own in the salt in his throat.  
   
She had nothing, no soul. No one did in this world. But he felt years and centuries and oceans in the dip of her spine. His love buried beneath the curve of her shoulder. She had stolen from him; she had taken from him, hid it in fires and lies.  
   
“You and me,” she breathed into the shell of his ear as she sank down, down.  
  
“ _Always_  going to be you and me.” It was so quiet, his ears strained. He hated himself for trying; hated her for being here. For being alive, and  _here_ , while the rest of his love was buried in some quickly forgotten earth; burned to ashes in the sun.  
   
She didn’t deserve it; he didn’t know how to stop.  
   
They were alive, and he could feel it in his blood.  
   
Oh, how it hurt.

 

\--------------------------------

**Author's Note:**

> For youcallitwinter over at LJ.


End file.
